honeydevil
Active Member
“All for One and One for All”
“Another year passed and the horrible weekend knocks on my door again” thought Danielle Spades while she laid in bed and tried to push the memories of the past years out of her mind. The only thing that persuaded her to leave her warm and snuggly bed this Friday morning was the comforting thought that after this three days of torture her family will leave her alone for another year. Since her dad died a few years ago and left her mother as well as Danielle and her two siblings, Marc and Amelia, alone, the Spades family avoids each other as best as they can. Only once a year they meet at the family cottage in the mountains of Utah like they always did when Marc, Danielle and Amelia were kids. The moment the sun touches the horizon this evening, Danielle drives with her old Ford Mustang along the highway and passes the border to Utah. Her heart starts to cramp harder the closer she gets to the cottage in the mountains. She always dreads this weekend, the endless memory lanes, the criticizing of her mom and the happy family tales of Amelia and Marc. When she arrives an hour later at the house, she sees her mom sitting behind one of the windows of the first floor looking like the wicked witch of the west. Everything is exact as it was the last four years: dinner is served, everybody is sitting at the table, she is the last one to arrive and everybody thinks what they always think namely that “she, Danielle Spades, is the black sheep of the family and will never fit into the perfect family” all of them try to imitate. She breathes deeply one last time, opens the driver’s door of her Mustang and walks up to the gates of hell. She can’t even knock on the door, because six sparks throwing eyes watch her closely. It looks as if they were waiting a whole lifetime for her soul. “I’m overreacting” thinks Dany and throws her black coat in the direction of the wardrobe where it falls as a little pile on the blood red carpet, while she follows the three persons to who the eyes belong into the kitchen. The whole time during dinner, her brother, her sister and her mom talk about the things that changed in the past year while Dany just sits there and feels like a spectator. Nobody talks to her, nobody asks her how she’s feeling or what she is doing, but as long as her memory reaches into the past, it was this way. Nobody ever understood her, except her dad. She was his darling, his little Princess and he always favoured her. Marc and Amy felt left out and their little yellow monsters, called envy and jealousy, said hello once in a while, so they excluded her and after their dad died nothing changed. Dany was the outcast. Back in the present, while everybody else eats, drinks and talks, she cleans the table and decides to retreat to her room and visit her dreamland. The moment she lies down, sleep overwhelms her. The next morning Danielle wakes up through the knocking on her door, which is caused by her older brother, who looks like superman with his dark brown hair and his huge muscles. He yells: “Wake up Dany, Amelia, mom and I are ready to visit dad, you want to come with us, or do you need a special invitation?” Dany thinks about this gesture for a second and agrees to go with them and promises to be ready in a minute. Five minutes later, after she put on her black turtleneck, her black leather pants and her black cowboy boots, they leave the cottage and walk up to the little area with the iron fence and the white tomb on the left side. Every time she reads the words:
Daniel Spades
15.05.1928 – 13.01.2002
Husband and father
Loved and never forgotten,
that are written in golden letters on the marble, Dany thinks back and tears start rolling down her cheeks. The rest of the family seems cold to her the way they stand in front of the grave and don’t even talk to him. Every time she tries to explain how it feels when she talks to her dad, Amelia would say: “He is dead and lies in this box six feet under. “How can you talk to him?”, but in Dany's mind he is in heaven and he is watching her.
About ten minutes later Marc and Amy link arms with their infirm mom and get on their way back to the house, while Dany is still kneeling on the floor next to her fathers grave. She tells him all the things nobody wanted to hear about and she asks him: “Daddy? Are you lonely? Do you miss mom to be with you?” This instant the wind picks up and she interprets it as a “Yes”. She wipes her tears away from her flushed face and follows the others with some distance. Later they arrive at the driveway and the three siblings decide to take their ski and snowboard equipment and head to the snow-covered mountain while their seventy-three year old mom stays in the warm cottage and takes her well-deserved nap. Thirty minutes later the three snowmen stand on top of the mountain and Danielle closes her eyes, feels the cutting cold on her face and enjoys the fact that here is nothing around her but snow, wind and the board under her feet. She puts on her pitch-black glasses and hollers: “The one who touches the snow at the end of the mountain last has to wash my car” and Marc yells back: “You really want to take a chance at it?” And the next instant they spread their wings and start the flight down hill. When Dany touches the ground first, she has a strange feeling in her guts and suspects the worst. Marc and Amy end up a fraction after her, but Dany is already running to the car: “Hurry, hurry, we have to get back to mom, something happened.” Amy takes a look at her and shakes her head and asks sarcastically: “Where do you want to know that from?” “My stomach tells me that something is totally wrong, so just swallow your comments and get in the car, now…!” Marc hands the bunch of keys to Dany and this instant she steps with full force on the gas and drives back to the house like a maniac. The little stones that covered the driveway since the Spades own this house still fly in all directions while Dany storms into the living room, where her mom is lying in the armchair in front of the fireplace. The only noise you can hear is the crackle of the fire, no snoring, not even the slightest breathing. There it hits Dany: “She doesn’t breathe, call the ambulance… she doesn’t breathe…mom…mom…!” After Marc tried to feel her missing pulse, he pulls Dany softly away from the old lady in the chair and hugs her like he hasn’t done in almost fifteen years. Huge salty drops fall on her baby-blue snowboard clothes and leave little white circles behind. While the three siblings try to comfort each other, the undertaker puts their mom into a body bag, loads her into the hearse and gets back to his everyday life. The next three days everybody wore only black what the very oppressive sadness covering the cottage intensifies. At the misty morning of the fourth day the funeral takes place and Mrs. Spades finds her last resting place next to her husband in the mountains of Utah near the house where they met each other a long time ago. It is a very modest funeral and after the normal ritual ended, only Marc, Danielle and Amelia still stand at the grave and Marc says unexpected into the silence: “All for One ….” and Amy and Dany answer in chorus: “… and One for All.” In this moment standing at the grave of her mom and slowly turning away to the little snow-covered path down to the cottage, flanked by her older brother and her younger sister, Dany feels as if she belongs to them, as if they are one family, as if they are the Three Musketeers. She loves the feeling of love and support that starts to surround her like a warming blanket. All the way down to the house, she imagines to be a hero stepping out of the novel by Alexandre Dumas, wearing a huge hat with feathers and a uniform and right after her step two more heroes into our reality. All for One and One for All.
“Another year passed and the horrible weekend knocks on my door again” thought Danielle Spades while she laid in bed and tried to push the memories of the past years out of her mind. The only thing that persuaded her to leave her warm and snuggly bed this Friday morning was the comforting thought that after this three days of torture her family will leave her alone for another year. Since her dad died a few years ago and left her mother as well as Danielle and her two siblings, Marc and Amelia, alone, the Spades family avoids each other as best as they can. Only once a year they meet at the family cottage in the mountains of Utah like they always did when Marc, Danielle and Amelia were kids. The moment the sun touches the horizon this evening, Danielle drives with her old Ford Mustang along the highway and passes the border to Utah. Her heart starts to cramp harder the closer she gets to the cottage in the mountains. She always dreads this weekend, the endless memory lanes, the criticizing of her mom and the happy family tales of Amelia and Marc. When she arrives an hour later at the house, she sees her mom sitting behind one of the windows of the first floor looking like the wicked witch of the west. Everything is exact as it was the last four years: dinner is served, everybody is sitting at the table, she is the last one to arrive and everybody thinks what they always think namely that “she, Danielle Spades, is the black sheep of the family and will never fit into the perfect family” all of them try to imitate. She breathes deeply one last time, opens the driver’s door of her Mustang and walks up to the gates of hell. She can’t even knock on the door, because six sparks throwing eyes watch her closely. It looks as if they were waiting a whole lifetime for her soul. “I’m overreacting” thinks Dany and throws her black coat in the direction of the wardrobe where it falls as a little pile on the blood red carpet, while she follows the three persons to who the eyes belong into the kitchen. The whole time during dinner, her brother, her sister and her mom talk about the things that changed in the past year while Dany just sits there and feels like a spectator. Nobody talks to her, nobody asks her how she’s feeling or what she is doing, but as long as her memory reaches into the past, it was this way. Nobody ever understood her, except her dad. She was his darling, his little Princess and he always favoured her. Marc and Amy felt left out and their little yellow monsters, called envy and jealousy, said hello once in a while, so they excluded her and after their dad died nothing changed. Dany was the outcast. Back in the present, while everybody else eats, drinks and talks, she cleans the table and decides to retreat to her room and visit her dreamland. The moment she lies down, sleep overwhelms her. The next morning Danielle wakes up through the knocking on her door, which is caused by her older brother, who looks like superman with his dark brown hair and his huge muscles. He yells: “Wake up Dany, Amelia, mom and I are ready to visit dad, you want to come with us, or do you need a special invitation?” Dany thinks about this gesture for a second and agrees to go with them and promises to be ready in a minute. Five minutes later, after she put on her black turtleneck, her black leather pants and her black cowboy boots, they leave the cottage and walk up to the little area with the iron fence and the white tomb on the left side. Every time she reads the words:
Daniel Spades
15.05.1928 – 13.01.2002
Husband and father
Loved and never forgotten,
that are written in golden letters on the marble, Dany thinks back and tears start rolling down her cheeks. The rest of the family seems cold to her the way they stand in front of the grave and don’t even talk to him. Every time she tries to explain how it feels when she talks to her dad, Amelia would say: “He is dead and lies in this box six feet under. “How can you talk to him?”, but in Dany's mind he is in heaven and he is watching her.
About ten minutes later Marc and Amy link arms with their infirm mom and get on their way back to the house, while Dany is still kneeling on the floor next to her fathers grave. She tells him all the things nobody wanted to hear about and she asks him: “Daddy? Are you lonely? Do you miss mom to be with you?” This instant the wind picks up and she interprets it as a “Yes”. She wipes her tears away from her flushed face and follows the others with some distance. Later they arrive at the driveway and the three siblings decide to take their ski and snowboard equipment and head to the snow-covered mountain while their seventy-three year old mom stays in the warm cottage and takes her well-deserved nap. Thirty minutes later the three snowmen stand on top of the mountain and Danielle closes her eyes, feels the cutting cold on her face and enjoys the fact that here is nothing around her but snow, wind and the board under her feet. She puts on her pitch-black glasses and hollers: “The one who touches the snow at the end of the mountain last has to wash my car” and Marc yells back: “You really want to take a chance at it?” And the next instant they spread their wings and start the flight down hill. When Dany touches the ground first, she has a strange feeling in her guts and suspects the worst. Marc and Amy end up a fraction after her, but Dany is already running to the car: “Hurry, hurry, we have to get back to mom, something happened.” Amy takes a look at her and shakes her head and asks sarcastically: “Where do you want to know that from?” “My stomach tells me that something is totally wrong, so just swallow your comments and get in the car, now…!” Marc hands the bunch of keys to Dany and this instant she steps with full force on the gas and drives back to the house like a maniac. The little stones that covered the driveway since the Spades own this house still fly in all directions while Dany storms into the living room, where her mom is lying in the armchair in front of the fireplace. The only noise you can hear is the crackle of the fire, no snoring, not even the slightest breathing. There it hits Dany: “She doesn’t breathe, call the ambulance… she doesn’t breathe…mom…mom…!” After Marc tried to feel her missing pulse, he pulls Dany softly away from the old lady in the chair and hugs her like he hasn’t done in almost fifteen years. Huge salty drops fall on her baby-blue snowboard clothes and leave little white circles behind. While the three siblings try to comfort each other, the undertaker puts their mom into a body bag, loads her into the hearse and gets back to his everyday life. The next three days everybody wore only black what the very oppressive sadness covering the cottage intensifies. At the misty morning of the fourth day the funeral takes place and Mrs. Spades finds her last resting place next to her husband in the mountains of Utah near the house where they met each other a long time ago. It is a very modest funeral and after the normal ritual ended, only Marc, Danielle and Amelia still stand at the grave and Marc says unexpected into the silence: “All for One ….” and Amy and Dany answer in chorus: “… and One for All.” In this moment standing at the grave of her mom and slowly turning away to the little snow-covered path down to the cottage, flanked by her older brother and her younger sister, Dany feels as if she belongs to them, as if they are one family, as if they are the Three Musketeers. She loves the feeling of love and support that starts to surround her like a warming blanket. All the way down to the house, she imagines to be a hero stepping out of the novel by Alexandre Dumas, wearing a huge hat with feathers and a uniform and right after her step two more heroes into our reality. All for One and One for All.